Sample This: Sampling Randomly from the Streets

Say you want to learn about the average number of potholes per unit paved street in a city. To estimate that quantity, the following sampling plan can be employed:

1. Get all the streets in a city from Google Maps or OSM
2. Starting from one end of the street, split each street into .5 km segments till you reach the end of the street. The last segment, or if the street is shorter than .5km, the only segment, can be shorter than .5 km.
3. Get the lat/long of start/end of the segments.
4. Create a database of all the segments: segment_id, street_name, start_lat, start_long, end_lat, end_long
5. Sample from rows of the database
6. Produce a CSV of the sampled segments (subset of step 4)
7. Plot the lat/long on Google Map — filling all the area within the segment.
8. Collect data on the highlighted segments.